Let’s catchup a bit:
Despite some moments of delicious irony,1 last night’s White House Correspondents Dinner lived down to expectations. Here’s the Washington Post headline: “Trump’s insult-laden speech to press dinner draws mostly stunned silence.”
“Stunned”? Really? Actually, Trump’s unfunny slurs were the single most predictable thing about last night’s event.
President Donald Trump attacked a slew of journalists and some of his favorite political foils at a slimmed-down redo of the White House correspondents’ dinner on Friday, comparing one female reporter to a transgender social media star, mocking politicians’ physical appearances, and bringing his audience to mostly stunned silence for more than an hour before pulling out a red Trump 2028 cap and declaring he was running for another term.
Over at Status, Jon Passantino described “The White House Correspondents’ Disgrace.”
[The] evening’s veneer of civility quickly ended as Trump, the correspondents’ association’s guest of honor, delivered a keynote address laced with vile invective, using the stage to attack the journalists gathered in the room and his political enemies alike. Over the course of more than an hour, Trump offered a meandering and cringe-worthy speech that devolved into a barrage of personal insults and crude attacks, stripping away any pretense that the evening would serve as a celebration of the First Amendment.
The near-universal consensus is that Trump bombed. Big time.
Via the Independent: “Trump bombs at WHCD and slams CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in media rant”
President Donald Trump used a rambling, roughly hour-long speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Friday to savage members of the media and make a series of crude, often poorly received jokes about critics and Democrats.
At one point, the president openly complained about the “frickin’ stupid speech that they wrote” for him to offer the crowd after a bizarre sex joke about stairs didn’t earn many laughs.2
Trump’s attack on Kaitlin Collins:
“I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award. It was all about me. It’s a fake. She shouldn’t get the award. It was a fake, but I didn’t mind. I said, “Kaitlan, congratulations.” But it was fake. There’s no question about it.
“But she’s a young, attractive woman. She never smiles. I said, “Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile. You have a nice position. You’re at CNN — fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan. Just smile.”
“But we attack — and I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can. It was Dylan Mulvaney. [Mulvaney is transgender.]
Exit take: They should have walked out.
In today’s “To the Contrary” podcast, Jonathan Rauch joins me to explain how the "postmodern right" thinks it can manipulate reality, how Trump's people thought they could change civil society — and why they failed.
We also discuss Trump’s attempts to erase some of the casualties from the war with Iran, and Lindsey Graham's legacy.
Subscribers can listen to an ad-free version right here… or you can watch on YouTube / Listen (and subscribe) on Apple/ Spotify / iHeart / RSS Feed
**
Note: If you enjoy conversations like this one, or just want to hang around with smart, sane people, please consider joining us. As you know, we depend on the kindness of strangers to keep doing this work. And the dogs and I are immensely grateful for your generous support.
Some highlights of my conversation with Jonathan Rauch
Trump wanted to rewire civil society…. He failed.
The government put full fascist-style force on the street to intimidate the American public into docility. That also failed.
This is a post-modern Administration.
Todd Blanche, a dangerous nominee.
More podcasts…
I joined Molly Jong-Fast on Friday…
**
And, yesterday on MS NOW, I had some thoughts about Trump’s Smoot-Hawley tariffs:
"This is a fetish for Donald Trump," said Sykes, who argued Trump has been obsessed with the policy "going back to the 1980s" and it is "fixed in his head."
History, however, shows how bad an idea this is, said Sykes.
“I would like to throw in two words: Smoot-Hawley,” he said. “One of the most extraordinary things about the new tariffs is that Donald Trump, in his workaround of the Supreme Court decision, is going back to authority that was included in the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act” — the infamous legislation under former President Herbert Hoover often blamed for exacerbating the Great Depression.
“What’s really interesting, what I’m fascinated by, is this: A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump was saying that one of the reasons why he was so anxious to sign that memorandum of understanding with the Iranians was that if the war went on, it would create a global economic catastrophe. And then he specifically said that he did not want to be remembered like Herbert Hoover,” said Sykes. And yet, he is literally now using one of Hoover’s worst policies.
Saturday dogs
Chilling at the lake.
Chilling at home.
“Earlier in the night, Trump shook the hands of the Wall Street Journal reporting team who received an award for their coverage of an alleged birthday letter from the president to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump administration sued the outlet for defamation over this reporting.”
President Donald Trump’s ‘sex’ joke was met with complete silence by the journalists at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday.
Trump, whose marriage to Melania is at its lowest point due. to a ‘disturbing’ reason, said he believes in term limits for Congress members and then went on to share that a senator he knows got a text message from his wife, who said, “when you get home, I want you to immediately come up the stairs and make love to me, and he said, ‘I can’t do both.’”
When no one laughed, the president went on to explain the joke.
